


After Image

by esama



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Tragedy, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-08
Updated: 2015-06-08
Packaged: 2018-04-03 11:02:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4098592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esama/pseuds/esama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eggsy becomes Galahad</p>
            </blockquote>





	After Image

**Author's Note:**

> Proofread by Darlene  
> (The fic was named Mirage on Tumblr, but After Image just works better)

"This isn't the way it's supposed to go – but Eggsy," Merlin says. "We need you. If you want it… I'm giving you Galahad's position."

Eggsy hadn't hesitated then, but truth be told, he hadn't really grasped what it actually meant. The thing about him was that for most of his training at Kingsman, he'd remained that guy on the outside, looking in. Lots of the other candidates for Lancelot – the current Lancelot included – were either related to other Kingsmen, or they were their protégés, or some shit like that. And while Merlin might argue that Eggsy was Harry Hart's protégé the same way Charlie was Chester King's protégé… he wasn't. Not really. 

Because Harry had been in a coma for the most of Eggsy's training and they'd known each other a grand total of about half a day before Harry had appointed Eggsy as his candidate for Lancelot. There just hadn't been enough time for any protégéing or mentoring to happen in between and because of that, there's just a lot of shit Eggsy just doesn't know until he comes face to face with it in the aftermath.

He doesn't know all the shit that comes with being Galahad.

The Kingsmen are a weird sort of establishment. They're back-ass-wards in a lot of things because it makes shit just a tiny bit more convenient. Comes with the territory of being independent – they have the ease of cutting corners and one of those corners Kingsman cuts to fucking ribbons is _bureaucracy_.

Kingsmen don't _hire_ , and Kingsmen don't succeed, not really. Not the agents. The techies, they have it nice and simple – they get paid working front jobs in little front companies, flaunting their IT titles and IT wages, nice and simple, but Kingsmen themselves, the agents? They don't get paid salary – no, they _inherit_.

Eggsy wasn't Harry Hart's protégé, and never was. He was just a candidate Harry took a shining to and honestly, Eggsy would've fucking preferred it staying that way. Except it hadn't, because Harry died and Merlin – no, he's Arthur now – needed a quick, skilled replacement. And so now Eggsy is Harry's _heir_. It's even legal, written nicely in black and white on several fucking documents, thanks to the fact that will writing is par of course for a Kingsman – they update their wills every day, like clockwork, and before every mission, just in case. And like all their wills, Harry's will says the same.

Everything he owns goes to his successor, name to be filled out by the executor of the will, which is of course Arthur. Eggsy's name goes there, and so Gary Unwin inherits a fucking fortune.

It's just a bit fucked up.

Harry Hart was a modest man by Kingsman standards. Sure, he had as wealthy tastes as any other Kingsman, but at least he didn't live in a fucking mansion like the previous Lancelot – at least Eggsy doesn't have to deal with an estate and maids and butlers and stable boys and _horses_ like Roxy does. Instead he has to deal with a posh town house with several hidden cabinets, every piece of furniture costing more than Eggsy's mom's yearly salary. That, and millions in his bank account and locked up in investments in the tech industry because if Harry had been something, it had been insidiously with-the-times and all that shit.

The new Merlin writes Eggsy's sob story for those interested – lawyers, his investment broker, people like that – about why on earth a pleb like Eggsy ended up inheriting from a guy like Harry. In it Harry took him under his wing and grew fond of him, shit like that – between the lines it reads like they were _attached_ , which satisfies those who don't buy the sob story. Depending on who he talks to Eggsy is either Harry's adopted son or his gold digger arm candy, but either way, it works.

"This is fucked up," Eggsy tells Roxy later on, as they compare notes on inheritance tax and she tries to figure out whether to keep the previous Lancelot's horses or not. "Why did no one say anything about this before?"

"During training?" Roxy asks. "It would've been a bit much, don't you think – to talk about the inheritance and all? Would make it seem like that was the main interest."

"Wasn't it?" Eggsy asks, thinking about some of the other candidates and then scowls. No, it probably wasn't – because all those guys were already fucking rich. The Kingsman inheritance was probably a drop in the fucking bucket for a lot of them.

"Fuck," he mutters. "I don't know what to do with all this shit."

Roxy gives him a sympathetic look. "It's fine if you don't do anything, you know," she said.

Except it isn't – because Kingsman agents pay for themselves. The suits, the gear, flights across the world, rooms in expensive hotels, all that, they pay for themselves. There is no requisitioning of funds for Kingsman agents, no sir. That's paper work no one cares about. And there is an unspoken rule that comes with the inheritance – that it should be bigger by the time you died, not smaller. Harry had nearly doubled the Galahad fortune during his life, doing pretty well for one of the busiest Kingsman agents out there, and if Eggsy didn't at least try to do the same…

No one even speaks of the idea of leaving behind less – of _spending_ or _wasting_ the fortune – because it's unspeakable. It's not even a taboo, it's just frankly and strictly out of question.

And Eggsy has no idea what to do with that any more than he has any idea what to do with the idea that he's suddenly a fucking millionaire.

 

* * *

 

 

Eggsy goes over the house with a fine-toothed comb first because, well... it's a Kingsman house. Aside from those secret cabinets and the basement armoury that sits hidden behind the wine cellar, there are a lot of fucking traps in the house – and Harry has the place bugged to kingdom come. The guy took no fucking chances with his own living space.

Eggsy spent one night there, back when he and Roxy were the only candidates left in the Lancelot trials, when they had their traditional twenty four hours with the agents that had put them forth. It had been a good night – Eggsy had learned how to make and recognize a lot of posh drinks and how to hold specific glasses the right way, how to appreciate the drinks how they should be. Harry had also taught him how to recognise drugs in drinks – how they subtly changed the colour or the texture or the taste, and so forth.

They'd gotten as close to roaring drunk as Harry's gentlemanly ways had allowed – meaning Eggsy had been fucking shit faced and Harry had been greatly amused over him. Harry had told him stories of past missions, the ones no one thanked a Kingsman for, and Eggsy had probably spent most of the night just grinning at him like an idiot. It was, easily, one of the best nights of Eggsy's life.

It's hard to be in the house now – both with that behind him, and that night when Eggsy had watched Harry getting shot in the head. The laptop is still there and for a while Eggsy doesn't dare to touch it. He half wishes and half fears that when he slammed the thing shut it locked up and he wasn't going to be able to access it again – except he can. Arthur, it turns out, has been in and out of the place, and everything unlocks with _oxfords not brogues_.

Eggsy carries the laptop to the kitchen and gets drunk on really expensive whiskey and watches Harry's footage all night. Not the church one, no, but other ones. There are hundreds of hours of footage on Harry's laptop from dozens of missions and just every day events. Eggsy watches the day they met in front of the police station, watches himself from Harry's perspective, and passes out somewhere in the middle of their talk in the Black Prince.

 The next day he has a fucking heart attack because of Mr. Pickle and eventually moves the dead dog from the main bathroom to the front hall. JB won't stop barking at the stuffed dog, but Eggsy can't bear to get rid of it. It's a reminder that will probably keep on hurting for years to come, but he needs it.

That day, he goes back to the Black Prince and gets his mum – gets his revenge on Dean and his troupe of mutated gorillas too, but that's not gentlemanly so he doesn't dwell on it. As his mother packs her bags, Eggsy reacquaints himself with his sister who at first doesn't know him in his suit and glasses and haircut, but who warns up after he spends a bit babbling sweet nothings at her.

The idea that he gets to give her a better life than he got strikes him then and he very determinedly doesn't let his hands shake, doesn't let his expression break.

Michelle Unwin screams bloody murder when she sees Mr. Pickle, of course. It makes Eggsy feel a bit better about everything.

 

* * *

 

Eggsy isn't home that much though – there's a shit ton of work to do at Kingsman and all around the world. In between trying to come to terms with everything, Eggsy works his ass off trying to keep everything from blowing up. Millions of dead and a lot of world leaders headless makes for a very unstable world and for a while everyone is so busy trying to blame everyone else that no one is actually doing much of anything.

In the first months after V-Day, Kingsman stops World War III starting on fourteen separate occasions. Eggsy is part of three of those missions – one involves a sniper rifle and a few more dead government heads, one involves hacking a government facility and giving them a few hundred network errors that keep the twitchy officers there from launching nukes, and last one is a honeypot mission that ends up with Eggsy in bed with an arms dealer who'd gotten her hands on a couple dozen nukes and was trying to sell them to god only knew who. She mysteriously ends up being robbed that night.

In other news, Kingsman has nukes now.

He's not the only agent up to his balls in work – he doesn't see Roxy weeks at a time, and only hears from Arthur which country she is in at any given time. Between them and the other agents, they manage to keep the worst from happening – though a few civil wars break out, and there are a few hundred more riots and uprisings all across the world than there was before, the world still stands. The political situation is wobbly at best and the economy almost crashes daily – the stock market is in an on-again-off-again relationship with its investors and it makes everyone twitchy as fuck. But they survive.

It takes months, but eventually things even start evening out a bit.

Overall about half a billion people died during V-Day, and it will take a while before people recover from it. Some never will – and a lot don't even make the attempt, judging by the huge increase in suicide rates all across the globe. But eventually, things start settling, and eventually there are even celebrations. There are elections galore and pretty much every monarchy out there gets a newly crowned king or queen – UK included. There's a pinched, forced quality to the festivities surrounding the crowning of UK's new king, but hey… it's a good reason to get drunk.

Not that Eggsy needs a fucking reason.

"Hard day at work, luv?" Michele asks with that knowing look about her face as Eggsy collapses behind Harry's desk – _his_ desk – and opens the laptop. His mum and sister are on the floor, both lying on a soft quilt surrounded by bright toys and it looks just fucking lovely, all of it. They look at ease and happy. His sister is cooing at her newest doll and his mum got a haircut and new clothing and she looks bloody gorgeous; the strain of _Dean_ having left her and the ease of being a stay-at-home-mom softening her features.

"Something like that," Eggsy says, swirling the whiskey idly, plugging the headphones in and opening yet another clip.

It's a file from some mission that had led Harry to some posh pub somewhere in France. Eggsy can't understand a word of what Harry says to the mark whom he's quickly seducing with a mixture of his smooth, sophisticated voice and liberal application of alcohol, but that's fine. He closes his eyes and rests the whiskey glass against his forehead and just listens.

At some point his mother picks up his sister and leaves him to it – distantly he can hear them in the kitchen, both of them happy and babbling as they prepare dinner and it's all almost perfect. Almost.

Eggsy drowns himself in the sound of the dead man's voice and pretends it's enough.

 

* * *

 

Eggsy is a damn good agent and everyone knows it. At first the more _traditional_ Kingsman agents only look at him down their noses, like he's something they'd scrape off the bottom of their oxfords, but eventually it passes. First the acceptance is hard won and begrudging – first his successes are considered _flukes_ and _beginner's luck_. The thing is, they don't stick to the beginning – his success rate is fucking stellar. Slowly respect starts creeping in, and it's fucking well deserved too.

Eggsy is loyal, hardworking, and dedicated to his job. More so than is healthy at times, sure – but no one says shit like that at Kingsman. Their lives and lifestyles, well, they're not healthy anyway, and no one gives a fuck about what anyone's hang-ups or issues are. So long as they do their job and do it with style, it's enough.

And he's so very good with style. He dons it like a suit of clothes and makes himself at home in it. In that posture, in those gestures, and eventually in those sophisticated tones, in that accent.

Arthur sometimes looks at him funny, sometimes takes a double take, sometimes he frowns – but he never says anything.

Manners maketh the man, and Eggsy knows just whose manners he's adopting. And doesn't give a shit about how fucked up it is.

Thing is though, he wasn't in love with Harry back when the man had been alive. He'd been taken with the man, sure – it was hard not to be, Harry had been just so freaking easy to get infatuated with. But that had been it – it'd been part hero worship and part awe and a shit ton of gratitude, all wrapped up with admiration and more than a bit of lust. There'd been a lot of it, sure, but all of it had been mostly superficial. He hadn't really known Harry Hart at all, back then.

But he learns a lot about him afterwards.

Harry is in the arrangement of his house, in the furniture, in the choice of clothing that Eggsy still hasn't thrown out – in the cut of his suits and in the dress shirts, in the cardigans that are rarer in his closets but well worn and soft. He's in the books that fill the shelves in the sitting room, in the expensive, old fashioned little knickknacks that decorate the house. He's in that fucking dead dog that greets Eggsy every time he enters the house and won't stop reminding him whose house it was.

More than that, he's in the recordings and mission reports that Eggsy alone has open access to.

There's still hundreds of hours of footage to view and recordings to listen to. Unlike a lot of the other older generation Kingsmen, Harry had been all for the glasses and their many handy functions – and before that he'd been a huge supporter of body cams. There isn't a mission Harry had gone on that he hadn't recorded some way or another. He'd been a bit obsessed about it, Eggsy figures, like those old creeps that record the news every day and fill their houses with ancient vhs tapes that no one has any use for.

But then, Harry seemed to have a thing for collecting shit. Newspaper headlines and butterflies and the rest pale in comparison to the sheer wealth of information he's stored about his missions. Maybe it's another contribution of his to the Galahad fortune – he'd left behind twice the money and all of the wisdom, and Eggsy soaks it all in with odd desperation he can't put a name to.

He can sometime admit to himself that he really should stop. He knows he should stop. Lots of the recordings he views aren't even all that useful – just Harry going about the minutiae of missions, humming along with some smooth old record as he leafs through some stolen documents. It isn't useful, but Eggsy still watches, watches the movement of his hands – mimics it the next time he holds papers.

There's always something new in the recordings – another mission, a discussion with Arthur back when he was Merlin, with Chester King back when he was Arthur, with other agents. There are recordings of Harry walking down streets, him seated in Kingsman issued taxis, him cleaning his weapons with meticulous care, of him preparing food, of him eating. Normal every day thing that aren't helpful. Eggsy watches more of those than he watches the mission records.

There's several videos of Harry shaving too – and of course he used a straight razor like the posh git he was. Eggsy watches him strop the blade and prepare the lather and apply it to his face and then take the blade to his face, every move well rehearsed and efficient, downright sensual in its care. Eggsy rewinds the video eight times in a single night, and the next morning he cuts his face with the same razor.

It stops hurting eventually.


End file.
